Working the line in the recycling factory, the sheer grey, raucous monotony propelled me into the strangest of spiritual experiences. After the first few hours, my mind would numbly settle in to the grim monotony, and it would be just me, my motions, my breath-- in... out... in... and the trash flying by. A kind of meditative trance would overcome me, my arms working on their own picking and moving this or that. And then I felt it. Time and space collapsed into interconnection. I suppose it would be similar to what some folks experience in a forest, in a jungle, in Nature-- a transcendent spiritual connection to the web of life. But, this was different. There in the factory, immersed in Consumption and its endless flow of remnants, I felt my connection to the other factories, the other conveyor belts, the chasmic warehouses, the multitude of assembly lines webbing around the world. I felt the factory farms, the polystyrene moulding plants, the petroleum rigs sucking the depths of the ocean, the borg-esque oil refineries glowing in the night. I could feel the flow of semi-trucks on midnight super highways, endless trains and colossal container ships that had all brought this river of plastic bits to my touch. As I would move the PET bottle off the conveyor, I would sense my ineffable role in the destiny of its molecules. As I would move a container, I would also sense the fridge it had once sat, the family that had emptied it, the purchase in the colossal super market, the warehouse distribution center. I could feel the animals in their infinite pens, the massive fields of monocrops, the fish farms, the poultry in their great grey halls of egg and flesh (can we even call them chickens still?). I could sense the fertilizers, the pesticides the hormones, the fences and walls that guided and propelled this river on my straight and narrow conveyor. As the machines ground and spun around me, vents hissing and motors whirring, I could sense my fellow humans in far off factories, methodolically assembling, packing, sealing-up the very products that now sped by me in their tattered consumed remnants. Only the call for lunch-break broke the spell. Silent and numb from the noisy monotony we would stumble into the break-room for a few precious moments of human companionship-- or, often than nought, silence. Yet, there in our break-room, surely like countless other factory break-rooms around the world, stood two sentinels of the system. The beverage and vending machines offered us the very products that we had just been processing. The very wages that we got from working the line, the system, we then spent to make it spin again, faster, faster. After downing the coke, I stared at the empty can. When the bell rang to get back to work, I tucked it into my overalls, walked back to the line and tossed it into its pile. We can do way better than this.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 21:27:25 +0000
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